StatusPeople Fakers App Shows People Care About Their Follower Quality

By Rob | 26 Jul 2012, 10:30am | Category: Update

As some of you will be aware a couple of weeks ago we released a little app to check how many fake Twitter followers you and your friends have. And thankfully it has been quite a success.

In just a couple of weeks we've had nearly 6,000 sign ups and almost 10,000 checks have been run. We're very please and we would like to thank all of you who have tried our tool. We hope you have found it both informative and fun and clearly its success reveals how interested many of you are in your follower quality.

But it gets better... After our tool revealed that @LouiseMensch, high profile politician and founder of Menshn, had a spam issue we even got press coverage. We got in the Telegraph...

Status People, a Twitter statistics site which has a ‘fake follower check service’, flagged the odd jump - claiming that 97 per cent of her entire following were fake ‘robot’ accounts.

However, Status People’s methodology is limited as it only looks at a persons most recent 10,000 followers – which when a person's last 10,000 followers are all suspected to be fake - as they appear to be in Mensch’s case – makes monitoring her entire follower base basically impossible.

So what seems to have happened is Mensch - or someone else - bought 20,000 followers for her yesterday, just before StatusPeople looked at her last 10,000 to find out how many were fake. With a sample that bad, it overestimated the number of fake followers she has overall, and reported a dodgy stat.

We're very pleased as this has been a real marketing boon for us as a start up. But there is of course one point raised in our press coverage we would like to address. And that is the accuracy of our tool. We've never claimed our tool is perfectly accurate for those with large follower bases. In fact without access to the Twitter Firehose it never will be and we do make this clear on our info page...

If you're very 'popular' the tool will still provide good insight but may better reflect your current follower activity rather than your whole follower base.

We also understand that our tool and metrics need to be enhanced. And that is exactly what we plan to do. We are developing a fakers tracking service so people can see how their score changes over time. And we do plan to make our scoring system more reflective of the size of a user's follower base. Both of these we hope will provide insight into how users can improve and maitain their follower quality.

We will of course keep you informed of all our developments. And if you have any questions about our Fakers App please email us at [email protected]

Once again, thanks to all of you who have tried our tool we really appreciate it.